The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Historically, when gathering data from multiple sources either the various sources may need to be aware of any formatting requirements there may be for the data, or the entity performing the gathering may need to know how the data is formatted in the individual sources. If neither of the above is the case, the entity gathering the data may be limited as to how the data may be able to be utilized. Such a scenario may be exacerbated by the collection of data from users where any number of users may enter data and the users may not know, or really even care, what format the data is to be entered in. So long as the data serves the individual user's purpose, the user may be satisfied. Specifically, in scenarios where the data may concern descriptions of foods, including nutritional information, the data entered by various users may vary dramatically. As a result, an entity wishing to utilize the user entered data may have to manually modify individual user entries to conform to the desired data format or may have to live with the format of the data as the user entered it.